The most recent episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, “Lingerie is Not Armor” (2.3), follows up on its predecessor, “Body Language and the Male Gaze,” with a specific example of how videogames exploit the male gaze in order to—I guess—attract potential consumers in the coveted 15-35 straight, white male demographic.

I am a personal anti-fan of the metal bikini which shows up ad nauseum in fantasy games, particularly in World of Warcraft and often on night elves. But the metal bikini is just one example of idiotic female outfits, including snipers with boob-windows built into their outfits (Metal Gear Solid), booty shorts worn to investigate ancient tombs (Tomb Raider, prior to the 2013 reboot), and really tight bodysuits (Catwoman in Arkham City). And that’s just the first things that popped into my mind.

Sarkeesian uses a commercial featuring a cat-suit clad Joanna Dark, and then shows a mock-commercial which makes fun of this trope by featuring a hyper-masculine cartoon character, asking what he’s going to wear while he saves the world. It’s cute. And not entirely inappropriate, given some of the old commercials I’ve seen, particularly for old Tomb Raider games in the 1990s and early 2000s until Crystal Dynamics rebooted Lara Croft with pants.

Sarkeesian goes on to feature a particularly egregious perpetrator of the metal bikini trope in Soul Caliber (2008), and I have to say, I cannot imagine anyone—except possibly a BDSM mistress who really likes wedgies—actually wearing that outfit, much less in combat, since it would have to literally be superglued on to make those little stringy bits of fabric stay in place while moving. It’s awful. But, you might be tempted to say, that’s from 2008! We totally know better now.

But, clearly, we don’t. (And by “we” I mean the designers catering to that imagined pubescent male demographic that somehow all publishers think is a goldmine.) The next game on the list is from 2014 (Ultra Street Fighter), and features a street fighter in a thong.

And then we go through an actual rapid-fire list of awful outfits from a variety of games and genres over the last twenty years. And that’s just a handful of what must be nearly hundreds of games. (Admittedly, it also includes a clip from The Witcher 2 in which one of the characters is actively mocking another for not having on enough armor for combat—clearly satire rather than intentional titillation.)

And then there’s Bayonetta (2010). I know there are a lot of people who really love that game. I know there are a lot of people who believe that the way her sexuality is used—literally, in the embodiment of her hair, which is both her clothing and a weapon—is empowering. I don’t get it, at all, and neither does Sarkeesian, but I do know that there are some interesting arguments to be made about it, so I’m not going to condemn it outright here. However, Sarkeesian does point out that Bayonetta participates in a kind of misleading cultural practice of equating female power with sexuality—the femme fatale—in which sexuality becomes the key for women to access power. What this also means is that women who don’t exploit their sexuality lose power—or, rather, that women’s sexuality becomes aligned in such cultural artifacts with power to such a degree that the only power women are permitted must be sexual. And that is a problem, not explicitly within the context of the game, but because it presumes that women in power must also be highly sexual beings who used that sexuality to gain power—therefore, colloquially, “she must have slept her way to the top.”

Now neither I nor Sarkeesian is saying that Bayonetta makes the argument that women can only achieve power if they sleep their way into it—what we’re saying is that the pervasiveness of depictions like that in Bayonetta creates certain presumptions in the collective social consciousness that makes that presumption a part of our cultural capital. Women can only reach positions of power if they’re willing to bargain their sexuality for them—either by literally prostituting themselves for it, or by being willing to inhabit sexualized positions for the benefit and pleasure of others (usually men) by wearing sexy outfits or behaving in ways which maximize others’ perceptions of their own masculine virility.

Sarkeesian shows a series of female athletes in a variety of attire to demonstrate that context is the key—there are women in track, for instance, who wear not as much clothing as women in Judo, but that makes sense. She also makes the point that the problem of clothing is that it isn’t the amount of clothing so much as it is the sexualization of clothing that isn’t appropriate in context. She also presents several examples of sexuality that isn’t problematically sexualized—and then some which she believes are (although I’d argue that some of the latter are less problematic than she suggests). The overall point is that it isn’t sexuality that’s the problem—it’s the exploitation of sexuality and “sexiness” that causes issues.

This is not a problem, by the way, that can be laid at the door of videogames. Videogames are as much a symptom as they are a perpetuation of the problem—this happens on tv, in film, in books, in music, etc. It’s a ubiquitous part of modern American culture. But just because it happens everywhere does not mean that we should just shrug and accept it—I’d really prefer to see less of it, thank you very much. And we are—tv shows like How to Get Away with Murder are showcasing powerful women who aren’t exclusively featured for their sexuality (although Viola Davis is pretty hot), nor are their achievements attributed to being the wife/girlfriend/lover of a male in power.

Sadly, though, many videogames continue to demonstrate that they’re still stuck sometime in the 1980s or 1990s by featuring outfits like Quiet’s in Metal Gear Solid V, which is clearly a practical sniper’s outfit. The argument that “she picked it” (which she didn’t, since she’s a digital construct) just doesn’t fly with me—not only is Quiet’s outfit impractical in the extreme, but it’s clearly only there for the pleasure of a presumed-straight male audience. The assertion in the game that “she breathes through her skin” is about as idiotic a justification for overt sexualization that I’ve ever heard (and Sarkeesian says pretty much the same thing). If you’re going to make a person or alien or something that breathes through its skin, great—but don’t use it as a justification for putting exposed breasts in media.

The idiocy of some of the “reasons” for these outfits only compounds the idea that their presence in games is a kind of aesthetic temper-tantrum being thrown by male developers for the benefit of male players who don’t want those nasty feminists ruining their games by putting clothes on the female characters (clothes which, by the way, have nothing to do with the gameplay or content 99.99% of the time).

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that you’re making a game which takes place entirely on a resort beach. In that case, it would be realistic for all the women to be wearing bathing suits—many of them bikinis. Even then, however, I might suggest that such a game is intentionally choosing a situation in which it is “allowed” to sexualize women (depending, of course, on the game) so that when someone like Sarkeesian points it out, they can wave their hands and say “But it’s normal to wear a bikini to the beach! You’re just being an uppity feminist!”

Here’s the thing. In some cases, there are “legitimate” excuses for why a female character might not be wearing a lot of clothing (and no, “breathing through her skin” is not one of them). She might be at a beach, or she might be a Victorian prostitute, a Restoration-era actress, or on a tropical island in booty shorts and a tank top. Irrespective of the justification, we live in a culture where the objectification of women is a serious social problem, and when games create justifications for perpetuating that, they are not only participating in that culture, they are exacerbating it when they do so in an intentionally exploitative way—when a bikini is a reward (as at the end of the original Metroid) or the outfit is far more revealing than necessary (I’m not listing all the examples of this) or there is no need to include random prostitutes or bikini-clad-women other than to throw in a little bit of cleavage (also not listing all the examples of this).

Does this mean that women in games should all we wearing blocky business suits and button-down shirts or full body armor? Not if that isn’t appropriate attire. If you’re a combat specialist—like, say, the women in Halo Reach or Gears of War 3—then yes, body armor is a good choice. If you’re a spy, however, then it might be appropriate to wear an evening gown and heels on occasion. If you’re Lara Croft in Siberia, you ought to be wearing a parka (thank you, Rise of the Tomb Raider), but when you get to the thermal valley, something like a tanktop and cargo pants is more appropriate.

And yes, there are male characters who are sometimes put into equally stupid outfits—but not nearly as often. In fact, the relative infrequency with which male characters wear ludicrously revealing clothing is so scant as to be barely worth commenting on (although a banana-hammock is also really not appropriate combat-wear, either). But in Western culture, men are not the primary targets of objectification and sexism, so when male characters are featured in stupidly revealing clothing, it doesn’t do the same kind of social harm, and that’s why when we talk about the problems of metal bikinis, we aren’t talking about the guy in the steel thong.

Like this:

The first episode in Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games’ second season (2016) is all about the derrieres of female characters in games. This is not a case where the episode intended to focus on something else—third person games, for instance, which end up following around the badonk of the player-character—which accidentally ended up being all about backside, but intentionally. As in, someone (presumably Sarkeesian) decided that an episode needed to be made about booty.

Admittedly, the series is now offering up much shorter episodes (this one is six minutes and thirty-seven seconds, unlike the first season’s episodes, which generally ran around twenty to thirty minutes), so it makes sense that they would choose smaller topics or ideas. It will also allow the series to touch on more things, while also cutting down on production time. I think that’s probably a great direction for the series to take. Logistically, that part makes perfect sense.

Thematically, I am not on board.

First of all, by focusing a whole episode on the junk in various characters’ digital trunks, Sarkeesian is all but catering to the trollish perspective that feminists are just angry about the fact that they themselves do not possess attractive buns. Second, it’s quite frankly beating a very dead horse. No one is arguing that depictions of female characters in games—especially older games, such as the 1996 Tomb Raider, which is the first game the episode brings up—aren’t often depicted in a sexualized way, sometimes even to the level of the ridiculous. Third, it diminishes the integrity of the series because it causes people who were trying to take it seriously to dismiss it or to make ridiculous jokes.

But putting that behind us…

Sarkeesian’s series continues to suffer from a problem of historical context, made particularly evident by her continual use of old school games as examples. While the original Tomb Raider is a logical choice for any discussion of the sexualized depiction of female characters in gaming, it’s starting to get a little old. Lara Croft’s physical proportions are ludicrous and inhuman, even if their pixelated dimensions were once titillating. Everyone with eyes can see that. Even more importantly, there’s a new Lara Croft whose distribution of assets is more in line with what human women actually possess, and she wears mostly weather- and activity-appropriate clothing, unlike her earlier incarnation.

The propensity which Sarkeesian has for going back to earlier titles has the same problem literary and film critics have when discussing earlier eras; we can’t apply today’s standards to earlier works without falling victim to the fallacy of anachronism. We can’t say that Shakespeare was (or was not) a feminist, because feminists didn’t exist in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. We can’t say that Twain was racist for using “n****r” in Huckleberry Finn because the whole society in which he was operating was racist, and Twain himself at least had the wherewithal to make Jim a fully-functioning human being. We can say that both writers had certain thoughts or impressions about women or people of color, but we have to put those in context if we are going to be responsible critics of their work. Is Twain’s depiction of Jim racist? Of course it is! But in context it is less racist than much of what his contemporaries were churning out, so he gets some bonus points for that.

Similarly, Toby Guard’s design for Lara Croft (although he wasn’t actually responsible for the proportions of either breasts or rump) was radical for the 1990s, as everyone thought that a female protagonist would functionally kill the series before it even got started. (Obviously, it didn’t, and Tomb Raider is one of the most globally successful franchises in gaming… especially since it crossed over into graphic novels, film, and toys far earlier and more successfully than any other game franchise.) She is also an example of the horrific sexism that was part and parcel of the games industry in the 1990s, as no self-respecting diver would ever wear a wetsuit that failed utterly to cover her caboose (to say nothing about the questionable decision to strap skinning knives to one’s bare legs). But in order to understand her, we have to put her in context, and that’s not something Sarkeesian really ever does.

Aside from that, Sarkeesian lambasts the entire third-person perspective as being about female characters’ keisters… despite the rather obvious fact that the third-person genre can’t help but feature fannies (and not in the UK usage), irrespective of their gender, species, or level of attractiveness. Certainly, some of the shots included in the film of hinies were rather excessive, primarily in cut scenes where said hindquarters did not need to be featured quite so prominently (taking up 50-75% of the visual area of the screen). The problem here is not that the cheeks themselves are always in view as it is that the costumes being worn most often are either extremely clingy or aren’t actually covering the rears in question (which is an issue with costuming that applies equally to a character’s cleavage).

Her joke about “the strategic butt covering” for Batman in Arkham City is something I had noticed myself while playing: Catwoman’s very shapely seat is prominently featured, while Batman’s is very difficult to catch a glimpse of, thanks to his cape. For that, Arkham City does deserve a bit of a call-out (and I haven’t even mentioned Catwoman’s zippered top), and I agree with Sarkeesian’s point that the clothing of protagonists could leave us with a bit less to be desired.

Sarkeesian does point out that many games with male player-characters feature different camera angles which don’t show them from the waist down or are closer in, hovering just above their shoulders. Gears of War is one of those which appears in the episode—and in Gears 3 is equally true of the female and the male characters (which she doesn’t mention). It is also true that there are many games which allow players to choose the gender (and often species) of their protagonist (Mass Effect, Skyrim, Dragon Age), as well as their clothing, which do allow them to scope out the tushies of both genders. Sarkeesian says that most male arse is “lacking in definition” due to clothing or armor, but, again, this is more about costume choices than it is exclusively about whether or not baby got back.

The marketing issue of the ludicrous displaying of female gluteus maximus on posters and box covers is another problem, and it is one over which designers have very little control. Often, these artistic renderings are not connected to the work of the actual developers, and it’s well worth stating that there is a lot of work that needs to be done in the marketing departments of most media vis a vis sexist depictions of women.

Ultimately, though, I came away from this episode being profoundly disappointed in the shallowness of its treatment of games, and in its functional dismissal of what it means to be a feminist critic. Sarkeesian’s decision to reduce the series to pointing fingers at digital posteriors is a complete turn-around from where I thought she was headed at the tail end of the last episode, instead offering up the most one-dimensional and content-less reading of gaming visuals in the series to date. It was a real bummer.

In the seventh episode (fifth trope) of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, “Women as Reward,” Anita Sarkeesian is taking on the idea that a woman serves only—or primarily—as a reward for the (presumably male) player or player-character succeeding at a mission or at the whole game. Even before the episode begins, Princess Peach comes to mind, as do hundreds of princesses in fairy tales the world over.

It also reminds me of the fairy tale minigame in Contrast, in which the princess in question decides she’d rather go off and rescue herself, thank-you-very-much. (If you don’t know about Contrast, my review of it is here on TLF.) My point is that this is another one of those tropes that isn’t inherent to videogames alone; it’s a long-standing (and long-annoying, if you ask me) trope that has been a part of literary and cinematic narratives for centuries.

That doesn’t, by the way, make it any less sexist or annoying. The “male hero does thing in order to get the girl” (which is usually a nice way to say “get laid”) trope is old, tired, and objectifying, and thus a worthy target for criticism. So let’s see what Sarkeesian does with it.

Sarkeesian begins with Metroid. Oh, boy.

Metroid, for what it’s worth, has a female protagonist, which immediately makes most people assume that it gets a pass from a series like Sarkeeian’s which is targeting negative tropes about women in gaming. And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised. Samus Aran is, in my opinion, one of the best female characters in games, particularly given her early advent in 1986 (see my discussion of Samus as a feminist gaming icon here on TLF). But that is not to say that there aren’t problems with the way Samus appears in games, particularly in her (potential) final appearance in the 1987 game, and—especially—in The Other M.

The problem with Metroid’s conclusion is that the reveal of Samus’s female identity is designed as a reward, as Sarkeesian rightly points out when she explains that “the two best endings…reveal Samus in various states of undress.” The better a player is, the fewer articles of clothing Samus is wearing (armor, then a leotard, then a bikini), and the more her “sexuality” is featured explicitly as a reward. This shouldn’t detract from the fact that she is still a powerful female character, but these conclusions (because the pattern continues throughout the games) do continue to objectify Samus’s female body as a prize.**

Sarkeesian continues with a more standard interpretation of the trope: a series of clips in which scantily clad and buxom women drape themselves on male player-characters in racing games, fighting games, and single-player games. She continues with the “victory sex” or “rescue sex” reward scenes – scenes in which female NPCs agree to have sex with the player-character (becoming more graphic in more contemporary games) in return for having been saved (or for the player-character saving the world). In some games, players even receive achievements or trophies for having sex with these NPCs (Sarkeesian refers to this as “trophyism,” and links it to the concept of straight male entitlement), or for other, more ‘minor’ sexual conquests, such as staring at NPCs’ breasts or up their skirts.

Sarkeesian doesn’t take the time here to distinguish between a couple of generic video game conventions. While there certainly are games that make use of more casual “rescue sex” encounters between player-characters and NPCs, there are quite a few games (RPGs, primarily) which contain romance-missions in which players attempt to build relationships between player-characters and NPCs, often NPCCs (non-player companion characters, or characters who follow the player-character and interact frequently with the player-character in conversations and during combat and exploration).

In romance missions, the player is “rewarded” for their relationship with an NPCC (or NPC) through a romantic, often sexual, encounter, which could ostensibly cause this type of scene to fall into Sarkeesian’s schema of “victory sex.” However, the purpose of romance missions is not explicitly to foreground sex (although the degree to which the developers choose to titillate players by revealing—or not—the bodies of the player-character and NPCC in question varies by game and by pairing), but to foreground the relationship, as the mission often extends over the entirety of the game and typically contains only one (or a few) explicitly sexual encounters. Some games—notably, titles like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, as well as Skyrim—do not restrict the gender of the player-character or the NPCC in these missions, meaning that a male character might well be the “reward” in question (not all games restrict these relationships to heterosexual, either, for what it’s worth, a point which Sarkeesian touches on slightly when mentioning the outrage of straight male players at encountering gay romance options in BioWare titles).

I think it’s important here to acknowledge that there are ways in which sex (or romance) as reward is complicated by the inclusion of these types of non-essential missions, since the purpose of “romance” missions often focuses on the establishment of an emotional connection between the characters, rather than an exclusively sexual one. This is not to say that all instances of “victory sex” ought to be excused as “romances”; there are far more instances of objectifying “victory sex” than there are romantic sexual culminations.

This trope ties in with a later one—sexual conquest as a source of XP (experience points), which players then use to increase their abilities or health (as in God of War or Grand Theft Auto). Here, the sexual encounter provides a dual reward—both the encounter itself and the XP the player earns by participating in it, designed, Sarkeesian notes, to “validate the masculinity of presumed straight male players.” It not only reduces women to “experience point dispensers,” but reinforces the false suggestion that masculinity must rely upon a male’s ability to conquer female bodies, making this particular version of the trope problematic in terms of both male and female gender politics.

Putting this aside, Sarkeesian moves on to easter eggs and cheat codes which unlock explicit content, including alternate starting screens with topless women, NPCs with expanding breasts as a reward for tricks performed, and player-characters and NPCs in various states of undress during cutscenes and gameplay. She points out that these are not “glitches,” but intentional inclusions “on the part of the designers,” which, while accurate, does rather suggest that all designers are complicit in the inclusion of these instances, which seems less than accurate. In fact, it may be that some are the result of programmers’ or artists’ interference, rather than designers—or even earlier models which were discarded in favor of characters in more clothing but which were not removed from the game’s programming for fear of causing glitches (although I would venture that a fair number were intentionally included as a ‘joke’ or easter egg, but that doesn’t mean that all the developers were aware of or complicit in their existence). It’s also worth noting that some of these come from mods generated by players, rather than developers, then shared. I don’t say this to excuse their existence (which is rather objectifying and exploitative), simply as a point of clarification which might exonerate the otherwise-demonized figure of the designer.

As she moves on to things like unlockable costumes and collectables (the costumes are often scanty or sexually revealing, and collectables might include photographs, magazines, or other sexualized objects). It is clear that there’s a disparity between the kinds of costumes unlocked for male versus female characters. While male characters often get more “badass” armor or humorous costumes, female characters (even, Sarkeesian notes, those otherwise appropriately dressed) typically end up with “sexy NOUN” outfits (“sexy nurse,” “sexy schoolgirl,” “sexy pirate,” etc.) which are “completely inappropriate for the mission at hand.”

On a side note, I appreciated Sarkeesian’s scorn for Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015)’s “urban ninja costume,” or, in her words, “whatever the hell this is supposed to be,” while noting that the male protagonist is in a full commandant’s uniform. I also liked that Sarkeesian provided alternatives here—Alice: Madness Returns (2011) offers thankfully non-sexy costumes for its protagonist, although the game itself is otherwise rather poorly designed.

As Sarkeesian’s series has matured, she has become more aware of the problems introduced in the early episodes, and she has made a deliberate effort to make her later episodes more complex and nuanced, including positive examples alongside the negative ones and going out of her way to show a few more in-depth discussions instead of a long laundry-list of issues. This is probably the best episode in the series thus far (and is definitely better than either of the episodes in her Positive Female Characters spin-off series) just in terms of its attention to details, both positive and negative.

That said, I am skeptical that the series itself will be able to be called ‘successful,’ and this skepticism has very little to do with the relative quality of the series. Near the end of the video, Sarkeesian leaves behind videogames, and enters into a very serious discussion of straight male entitlement, sexual harassment, and rape culture, a conversation which I’m afraid will largely alienate those male gamers who might have otherwise been sympathetic to her points about games. Sadly, the discussion is one that needs to be had, although I’m uncertain whether Sarkeesian is the person to do it—not because she isn’t qualified, but because of the reputation she has acquired as a ‘feminazi’ or ‘man-hater.’

And I think that this is ultimately what I think is the biggest problem with Sarkeesian’s series: it isn’t going to reach the people who really need to see it, and if it does, they aren’t going to be open to the points she’s trying to make. The people who watch Sarkeesian’s videos do so because they either agree with her or they intentionally don’t want to agree with her; there are few people who watch the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series because they genuinely have an interest in learning about the problems of gender representation in games.

Like this:

I’ve been reading with amusement the blog “My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection” and following with interest the resulting debates around the blog. Quick recap: writer Sarah O’Holla created a Tumblr to review her husband’s collection of 1500 vinyl LP’s. It’s music criticism served with a side of snark – not too dissimilar from the kind of writing we do at TLF, and definitely written from the perspective of a semi-interested musical bystander, which is novel in the world of music writing where these days everyone must be an obsessive expert.

The debate around this blog comes from some critics who find the blog’s tone to be problematic; specifically that it reinforces stereotypes about the place women music fans hold in rock fandom, particularly the idea that women aren’t discerning collectors and critics of rock music.

Here’s what Slate’s Amanda Hess had to say:

“When O’Holla reviews an Anthrax album by writing, “Okay, yes, they’re saying ‘murder’ over and over again, next is ‘hatred.’ AHHH!!!!! I’m so scared!!!,” she’s throwing an elbow straight to the belly of the music bro. But seen another way, her exercise is not very funny at all, because it helps those same music-nerd dudes who have boxed women out of the subculture—keeping them on the periphery in the roles of wives and girlfriends—to share the link as confirmation that women just don’t get it.”

I get this argument. The tone of “My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection” does reinforce the Nick Hornby/Judd Apatow “obsessive fanboy man-child and exasperated wife/girlfriend” trope I don’t take personal offense to it because its so prevalent in pop culture I’ve become desensitized when I see it. But it is annoying, and it does add just enough fuel to the fire to make things harder for women attempting to establish a voice for themselves in the boys club of rock criticism -and fandom. It does place women firmly on the outside looking in, reinforces the same of gendered assumptions about women and criticism – that critical, “meaningful” discussion about music is not in our nature. And of course, it gives chronic mansplainers one more excuse to interrupt us while we’re talking to tell us stuff we already know.

But I also think this blog is important, and needed for music fans of any gender, because it makes music criticism more open and accessible to those new to such conversations, which doesn’t happen nearly enough – particularly online, where musical knowledge is collected and categorized like baseball stats, and music nerd conversation seems to be centered around the idea of de-legitimatizing others’ tastes to prove musical superiority. Pitchfork has pretty much created a cottage industry around rock-bro fandom and the state of online music writing and fandom has adjusted itself to that standard, rather than allowing other voices in. Perhaps fans are connected to My Husband’s Stupid Music Collection precisely because it is speaking to an audience outside of the rock-bro elite and it potentially opens up online music fandom more broadly than it would ever go if left in the hands of said music bros. And goodness knows that is needed.

I want to add, as an aside, that I’ve been lucky to not experience nearly as much of the condescension and harassment that my colleagues have experienced in my rock music writing and fandom. Maybe it is because my racial identity, or more specifically my experience as a black woman tends to inform my perspective more than gender alone, or because I have a unique enough name that often my gender isn’t immediately evident, or – let’s go there for a second – maybe my identity as a black woman defeminizes how I am perceived in the eyes of some. I dunno, and I would need a whole other post to unpack that.

But I know it’s a very real occurrence for many, and I think it has as much to do with how music genres are gendered as well, how pop music is an acceptable genre for women to lend their critical voice to – probably the only genre that women’s voices are considered legitimate, and then it often gets de-ranked from “true” music criticism into “celebrity journalism” There are a lot of bigger issues about the field of cultural criticism, who gets to be called legitimate, what in pop culture gets to be called legitimate, that come to the surface in discussion about the My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection blog.